1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image encoding device and an image encoding method that are provided to measure the distance between the image encoding device and a subject when the subject is shot so as to obtain the subject image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various technologies have been developed to obtain realistic video data. As a method for achieving the realistic video data, the reproduction of a three-dimensional image may be considered. The three-dimensional image is generated, for example, by shooting the same subject from the viewpoint of each of the left eye and the right eye so that two image data items are obtained. At the reproducing time, the left-eye image data can be viewed through the left eye and the right-eye image data can be viewed through the right eye. The image data of a subject shot from the viewpoint of each of the left eye and the right eye is referred to as parallax image data.
According to the simplest method for generating the parallax image data, two cameras are provided at the positions corresponding to the left and right eyes so that two kinds of images are obtained through shooting. According to the above-described method, however, enormous efforts and costs are expended on the shooting. Therefore, a technology for generating three-dimensional image data based on two-dimensional video data obtained through shooting performed by a single camera has been hoped.
When the three-dimensional image data is generated based on a single two-dimensional image, two parallax images should be generated based on a single two-dimensional image data item. In the past, a three-dimensional image generating system configured to generate two parallax images based on a single two-dimensional image used distance information indicating the distance between the three-dimensional image generating system and each of subject images shown in the two-dimensional image data. The distance information is obtained, for example, through a person viewing an image and estimating the distance between a viewpoint (the camera position) defined at the image-data-generation time and the subject. However, since the distance information is estimated by the person in the above-described example, it has been difficult to automate the above-described steps.
Therefore, a technology for automatically measuring the distance between the system and the subject during the generation of a two-dimensional image has been hoped. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 08-70473 discloses the technology for automatically measuring the distance to a subject and adding the distance information to data of a single two-dimensional image during the generation of the two-dimensional image data.